1. Technical Field
The present disclosure relates to web servers (e.g., HTTP servers) and more specifically to simplifying addition of web servers when authentication server requires registration.
2. Related Art
A web server refers to a system which serves content in the form of web pages in response to receiving corresponding requests. In a common scenario, a client system sends a request for a web page (identified by a Uniform Resource Locator (URL)) on the Internet using HTTP and a HTTP server (example of a web server) forms and sends the requested web page to the client system. The HTTP server may either retrieve static web pages or form/create the content for the web pages (e.g., by interfacing with external application servers), as is well known in the relevant arts. A version of HTTP is described in further detail in RFC2616 entitled, “Hypertext Transfer Protocol—HTTP/1.1”.
Users are often required to be authenticated before a web server permits usage of applications and/or access to data, as is well known in the relevant arts. In a common approach, a user is required to provide a user identifier and a password combination, and if the provided combination is an authorized combination, the user is deemed to be authenticated. However, additional information and/or other approaches (e.g., based on biometrics) can also be used for authentication.
Authentication servers are often employed in organizations, which maintain the information required to authenticate each user, in addition to authenticating the users. For example, in the case of user identifier and password combination noted above, such combinations for various users may be maintained by the authentication server. A received combination may be compared with the maintained combinations to authenticate the user. A single authentication server may be shared by several web servers, with each web server potentially serving many users and user requests in parallel.
A web server may be required to be registered with an authentication server before the web server can be used to authenticate a user using the authentication server. Registration entails configuration of the authentication server and/or web server with appropriate information such that the web server is thereafter permitted to use the services provided by the authentication server.
One problem in such an environment is that when the enterprise expands and web servers are required to be added, each web server needs to be registered with the authentication server. The associated overhead may be unacceptable at least in some situations.
Various features of the present invention address one or more of the problems/requirements noted above.
In the drawings, like reference numbers generally indicate identical, functionally similar, and/or structurally similar elements. The drawing in which an element first appears is indicated by the leftmost digit(s) in the corresponding reference number.